All hail, Liberia, hail!
All hail, Liberia, hail!
This glorious land of liberty shall long be ours,
Tho’ new her name, green be her fame,
And mighty be her powers.
In joy and gladness with our hearts united,
We’ll shout the freedom of a land benighted.
Long live Liberia, happy land,
A home of glorious liberty by God’s command.
All hail, Liberia, hail!
All hail, Liberia, hail!
In union strong success is sure, we cannot fail
With God above our rights to prove.
We will o’er all prevail.
With heart and hand our country’s cause defending,
We’ll meet the foe with valour unpretending.
Long live Liberia, happy land,
A home of glorious liberty by God’s command.
The patriotic sentiments sounded better as I heard them later bawled by a school of two hundred children in Monrovia; here it was ‘the land benighted’, the tall trees standing like cliffs of dull green stone on either side, which really prevailed. After a while Victor Prosser ceased to sing and dropped farther and farther behind in his flopping slippers. I could hear him humming Venite, Adoremus, as we passed the coffin-shaped holes dug by some Dutch prospector, who had been that way alone a year before.
Toweh-Ta was quite a large town; a Paramount Chief had his compound there, and the forest was cleared away from its outskirts. A broad bare road sloped up to it and a big square hut behind a fence at the beginning of the road was Victor Prosser’s school. His manner had altered; here he was someone of importance. It was about half-past nine by our time, which agreed roughly with the handsome silver watch Victor Prosser had won on the Coast. School, he said, would have started; his assistant would be controlling the boys till his coming, and he asked us in to see the class at work. But when he opened the door there was no class: only a little room of empty benches, a cane balanced on two nails, a desk which just succeded in standing on four loose crooked legs. And when Victor Prosser angrily demanded why the school bell had not been rung, the young assistant pointed to a rusty kitchen alarm clock on the desk. By his time it was only eight-forty-five. Victor Prosser was embarrassed: we all compared watches: then he rang the bell, put the clock to nine and led us up the hill to the Paramount Chief’s cookhouse.
This impressive building was too large for me to photograph: I couldn’t get far enough from it. A circular building with open sides, it had a huge cone chimney of smoothly plaited reeds. Where it fitted down over us like a fool’s cap it must have been about a hundred and fifty feet in diameter, and it narrowed very gradually until through the top, more than the height of Salisbury Cathedral nave, a handkerchief of sky was visible. Here the town chief came and dashed me a chicken and a hamper of rice – embarrassingly, for the hamper was a man’s load and my cousin’s hammock-men had had to be reduced to three.
It was another five hours’ march to Greh, by a track of appalling monotony. I tried to think of my next novel, but I was afraid to think of it for long, for then there might be nothing to think about next day. Greh, at the end of it all, proved an even more primitive village than Baplai. It was impossible for us to sleep in the huts, for their roofs were built so low that we could not stand upright, and there was no room for the poles of the mosquito-nets. So I ordered our beds to be put up in the cookhouse in the centre of the village, to Amedoo’s distress; he had never travelled before with white people outside Sierra Leone, and we lost caste by exposing ourselves to the stares of the villagers in the wall-less cookhouse.
There was one boy, the chief’s son, who could speak English, for he had been educated on the Coast and called himself Samuel Johnson, and there were strange bits and pieces of ‘civilization’ scattered about the primitive place, which seemed to indicate that at last one was going south. In the cookhouse someone had painted little bright child-like pictures of steamships; a boy carrying an umbrella was naked except for a piece of blue cloth strung on beads over the genitals and a European schoolboy’s belt with a snake clasp which he wore half-way up his torso, between his breasts and navel; and what seemed another scrap of ‘civilization’, for sexual inversion is rare among the blacks, a pair of naked homosexuals stood side by side all day with their arms locked and their hair plaited in ringlets staring at me. Vande got drunk again with palm wine and Amah cut off the top of his finger with one of my swords chopping meat for the carriers’ meal. I felt irritated with everyone and everything; I could no longer afford to drink much whisky, for my case was nearly exhausted; I went to bed and lay awake all night because the goats came blundering in, tripping up over our boxes. I was vexed with them in a personal way, as if they could help their stupidity, their clumsiness. I would have exchanged them happily for rats; rats were almost as noisy, but I told myself that there was something purposeful in their noise; they knew what they were doing, but these goats were stupid. . . . I could have cried with exhaustion and anger and want of sleep.
Tapee-Ta
And then, when he came in the morning to wake me, Amedoo said that Laminah was too sick to walk. He had lain awake all night in pain from his gum where the tooth had been drawn. The aspirin I had given him was useless. Now he was getting a little sleep for the first time. This was far more serious than the sickness of a carrier; I had less responsibility for a carrier; he was in his own country if not in his own tribe; but Laminah I had brought from another country, he couldn’t be simply jettisoned. But neither could I bear the thought of another day in Greh. I had promised the carriers a rest in Tapee-Ta because that was a large place with a District Commissioner where I could hope to buy fresh fruit, which we were beginning to need badly. Even limes had given out at Sakripie and we had seen no oranges for two weeks, but in that respect Tapee was to disappoint us.
I suggested to Amedoo that Laminah should stay behind for a day and we would wait for him at Tapee-Ta. But Amedoo said that he was afraid of being left. ‘This is Gio country,’ Amedoo explained, ‘they chop people here.’ So my cousin gave up the hammock to Laminah, who looked half dead when he was laid in it; and I wondered what my conscience would say to me if he died, if my curiosity for new experiences led to the death of someone so charming, so simple, capable of such enjoyment. I was afraid of blood poisoning, but I need not have been frightened. I think it was cowardice Laminah was suffering from, for he recovered very quickly at Tapee.
Three hours through the forest brought us out into a rough road as wide as Oxford Street. Here was an example of what the President had told me of the road-building in the interior. Although the road was too rough for any kind of mechanical transport, it was impressive to see the enormous rampart of trees on either side from which it had been cut.
We were coming in range again of Liberian authority. I had already heard tales of the half-caste Commissioner at Tapee-Ta, and I was anxious to meet him. But I had not foreseen the extent of my good fortune. Colonel Elwood Davis, the leader of the campaign on the Kru Coast, the man responsible for the atrocities described in the British Blue Book, was at Tapee-Ta; I heard his name repeated by passing natives all along the great four-mile stretch of road. His name carried weight; his friends in admiration and his enemies in derision, I discovered later, called him ‘The Dictator of Grand Bassa’.
The road did not stretch as far as Tapee-Ta. After an hour we reached the end, where a gang of naked men was at work felling an enormous silvery cotton tree in the centre of the road. They had dug a trench about three feet deep and squatted in it singing and hacking at the trunk with ordinary bush cutlasses, the rhythm given them by two men with drums. Then there were several more hours of forest path before, in the hottest part of the day, when the sun was directly overhead, we came out of the forest on to a wide exposed road again. The powdered soil was quite white under the sun: it blinded the eyes, even behind smoked glasses.
Amedoo joined me: he had been talkin
g to Mark and the other carriers, and he was uneasy about the great man at Tapee. He was a wicked man, he said. ‘Will he make trouble for massa?’ I wasn’t at all sure that he mightn’t. The Liberians were under the impression that I was travelling only in the Western Province, and here I was, a long way to the east, in the Central Province. I had no proper papers: my Liberian visa only gave me permission to land at accredited ports.
I was a little uneasy. I hadn’t met Colonel Davis then and I think I pictured him as something rather ferocious in the manner of Emperor Christophe. I couldn’t help remembering the Blue Book phrases: the murdered children, the women in the burning huts, Nimley’s pathetic dignity, ‘And when I learnt that Colonel Davis had fought with Tiempoh, who are my children . . .’ It certainly did seem to me that there might be trouble.
I was more uneasy still when we came in sight of the District Commissioner’s compound (the town of Tapee lay beyond). It was an impressive group of verandahed bungalows behind a stockade with an armed sentry at every gate, and the Liberian flag flying from a staff in the middle. Although it was time for siesta, there seemed to be a lot of movement; many things were going on. From the journalist’s point of view, I seemed to have come at a favourable moment, but from the Liberian point of view I couldn’t help feeling that I must look very like a spy (the moment was too opportune to be accidental) as I led my odd caravan round the stockade to the main gate.
Chapter 3
THE DICTATOR OF GRAND BASSA
Black Mercenary
I FELT very dirty as I followed the sentry into the wide clean compound and rather absurd, with my stockings over my ankles, my stained shorts, my too, too British khaki sun helmet. I was very much at a disadvantage, standing beneath a verandah crowded with black gentlemen in the smartest of tropical lounge suits and uniforms. They had just finished lunch and were smoking cigars and drinking coffee: I wondered which was Colonel Davis. There was an air of subdued activity as I stood there in dirty neglect in the sun: clerks kept on delivering messages and running briskly off again, sentries saluted, and the supercilious diplomatic gentlemen leant over the verandah and studied with well-bred curiosity the dusty arrival.
The sentry returned and led me across the compound to another bungalow, a less smart one this time, with a few rickety chairs on the verandah. The District Commissioner appeared in the doorway, a slatternly mulatto woman peered over his shoulder. He was a middle-aged man with a yellow face and Victorian side-whiskers; he hadn’t shaved for a long time; his teeth were bad, and he wore a shabby khaki uniform and the dirtiest old peeling white sun helmet I had ever seen. He was like a stern and sadistic papa in a Victorian children’s story; his name was Wordsworth, but he was more like Mr Fairchild than the poet. I think his appearance maligned him and that really he was shy and afraid of humiliation; I think quite possibly, like Mr Fairchild, he had a heart of gold under that repressive exterior. Now he stood above me like a little yellow tyrant, and I really believed at first that he would refuse me a house, but instead he called his young brother, the Quartermaster.
Mr Wordsworth, junior, was quite different. He had a round seal-grey face with soft lips (there seemed to be less white blood in his veins) and he had a passion for friendship. He it was who had raised his hat to me at the crossing of path and road at Ganta. He led me to the next bungalow: a palatial building of four rooms and a cookhouse. In one of the rooms we found the Paramount Chief, squatting on the native bed, eating his lunch with the clan chief; he was very like the ex-King of Spain and wore a soft hat and a native robe. We had arrived at Tapee during a conference of the local chiefs. They had made complaints against the District Commissioners, especially against Mr Wordsworth, and Colonel Davis had arrived as the President’s special agent to hear the complaints. There were several DCs now staying in the compound. We had arrived in the lunch interval.
I sat down in a wooden chair and waited for the others to arrive. The Paramount Chief hastily came out of the bedroom and said the chair was his. I could sit in it, but it was his. The palaver-house in the compound began to fill up with chiefs who streamed in at the gates in soft hats under umbrellas, their chairs carried by boys. I began to ask the Paramount Chief to sell me rice for my men. Thin, vital, Bourbon-nosed, he seemed to pay no attention whatever. He strode away to say something to the clan chiefs, then strode back and said I could have rice at four shillings a hamper. I said that was too much, but he was gone again. His mind was full of state affairs, he hardly had time to bring the price down to three shillings, and before I could propose half a crown, he was off to the palaver-house. Then a bugle blew and Colonel Davis, accompanied by the DCs, walked across the compound to the council.
Even at a distance there was something attractive about the dictator of Grand Bassa. He had personality. He carried himself with a straight military swagger, he was very well dressed in a tropical suit with a silk handkerchief stuck in the breast pocket. He had a small pointed beard and one couldn’t at that distance see the gold teeth which rather weakened his mouth. He was like a young black Captain Kettle and reminded me of Conrad’s Mr J. K. Blunt who used to declare with proud simplicity in the Marseilles cafes, ‘I live by my sword.’ He had noted our arrival and presently the seedy Commissioner appeared to say that the President’s special agent wished to see our papers.
It was the first time in Liberia that our passports had been examined. The absconding financier whom I have imagined settling in the unpoliced hinterland of Liberia, taking his holidays at will in French Guinea, a good enough substitute for Le Touquet without any tiresome bother about papers, would do well to avoid Tapee-Ta. For there is a prison in the compound at Tapee-Ta, and though the dictator of Grand Bassa was satisfied with our passports, which certainly did not include permission to pass through Central Liberia, the financier might have fared worse.
That prison, next door to our own bungalow, combined behind its thatch and whitewashed walls and tiny port-holes the sense of darkness and airlessness, and the kind of mindless brutality which sometimes vents itself in this country in the torture of a cat (the head warder was a moron and a cripple). Each port-hole, the size of a man’s head, represented a cell. The prisoners within, men and women, were tied by ropes to a stick which was laid crosswise against the port-hole outside. There were two or three men who were driven out to work each morning, two skinny old women who carried in the food and water, their ropes coiled round their waists, an old man who was allowed to lie outside on a mat tied to one of the posts which supported the thatch. In a dark cavernous entrance, where the whitewash stopped, a few warders used to lounge all through the day shouting and squabbling and sometimes diving, club in hand, into one of the tiny cells. The old prisoner was a half-wit; I saw one of the warders beating him with his club to make him move to the tin basin in which he had to wash, but he didn’t seem to feel the blows. Life to him was narrowed into a few very simple, very pale sensations, of warmth on his mat in the sun and cold in his cell, for Tapee-Ta at night was very cold. One of the old women had been in prison a month waiting trial. She was accused of having made lightning in her village, and there was a pathetic impotence in her daily purgatory under the staggering weight of water from the stream half a mile away. If she could make lightning, why did she not burn the prison down or strike the dilatory Commissioner dead? Very likely she had made lightning (I could not disbelieve these stories; they were too well attested), but perhaps the natural force had died in her during her imprisonment, or perhaps she simply hadn’t the right medicines with her in that place. I asked the Quartermaster when she would be tried; he didn’t know.
The council in the palaver-house went on till after five: the place was packed. It must have been appallingly hot. One suspected that the whole inquiry was designed to quiet the chiefs rather than try the Commissioners, for the judge was a cousin of the principal accused. But at any rate he showed patience and endurance.
Later that evening came the ceremony of lowering the Liberian flag, carrie
d out with solemnity; two buglers played a few bars of the national anthem –
In joy and gladness with our hearts united,
We’ll shout the freedom of a land benighted . . .
and everyone on the verandahs stood at attention. When it was over I sent a note across to Colonel Davis asking for an interview and received a reply that he was worn out by nine hours of council, but would spare me a few minutes.
The ‘few minutes’ developed into several hours, for the Colonel was garrulous, and after more than an hour’s conversation on his verandah we adjourned to mine for whisky. He had once been a private in the American army and his career, if frankly written, would prove one of the most entertaining adventure stories in the world. As a private or a medical orderly in a black regiment – I forget which – he had served in Pershing’s disastrous Mexican expedition when hundreds of men died in the desert for lack of water; later he had seen service in the Philippines; and finally, for what reason I do not know, he had left America and come to Monrovia. He was very soon appointed medical officer of health, though I do not think he had any kind of medical degree, and from this vantage point he had worked his way into politics. Under Mr King’s presidency he had been appointed Colonel Commandant of the Frontier Force and had managed to shift his allegiance to Mr Barclay when Mr King was forced to resign after the League of Nations inquiry. No story was undramatic to Colonel Davis, and the whole shabby tale of Mr King’s participation in the shipping of forced labour to Fernando Po and his rather cowardly acceptance of the League’s condemnation, which threatened Liberian sovereignty, followed by his resignation when the Legislature proposed to impeach him, became an exciting melodrama in which Colonel Davis had played an heroic part.
‘They were thirsting for his blood,’ Colonel Davis said dramatically, but nothing which I saw later of the coastal Liberians lessened my doubt whether they had the vitality to assault anyone; with cane juice they would work themselves up to a height of oratory, but as for murder . . . He lowered his voice. ‘For twenty-four hours,’ he said, ‘I never left Mr King’s side. The mobs were going about the streets, thirsting for blood. But they all said, “We cannot kill King without killing Davis.” ’ The Colonel flashed his gold teeth at me, deprecatingly. ‘Of course –’